I now intend to introduce a new regular feature to this blog, viz., a series of competitions related to Verne Studies, literature generally, and Translation Studies.
The first competition, set out hereunder, is what I call the Verne Conundrum Competition. If you are a fan of the board game Scrabble, or of such television programmes as Channel 4's long-running words (anagrams) and numbers puzzle show Countdown, or of the French afternoon quiz Des Chiffres et des Lettres, you may particularly enjoy the type of puzzles I am giving here. You will probably also enjoy unscrambling these particular anagrams if you are a fan of the works of Jules Verne.
If you are interested in entering this competition, please email your answers to me at kieran.odriscoll3@mail.dcu.ie including a postal address to which I can send you the prize, which is, for this first competition, a copy of the newly republished The Tour of the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne, translated by the Philadelphia-based translator Stephen W. White in 1874. This is a beautiful edition with all of the original illustrations and new critical material, and is published by the Choptank Press, USA. It is not available in bookshops, but only through http://www.lulu.com/ and will constitute a valuable addition and collector's item in the library of any Verne reader or book lover generally.
This book will be posted to the e-mailer of the first fully correct set of (5) answers to the five 'scrambled word' puzzles below..
So here's what you have to do: I set out hereunder five words which are all in some way connected to the themes of Jules Verne's Extraordinary Journeys to the known and unknown worlds (Voyages Extraordinaires dans les mondes connus et inconnus), his lifelong opus of approximately sixty novels and novellas on themes of exploration, geography and science, among other topics.
The letters of each word have been randomly scrambled, so you need to rearrange them and tell me what the five words are. This puzzle is based on the exact same principle as applies on each of the Countdown letter games and conundrums/teasers, all of which involve solving anagrams. It is similarly based on Scrabble principles.
To make this first competition relatively easy, and to encourage as many blog readers as possible to enter, and emerge from the cyber-woodwork, I have given a clue as to what each word might be. These clues are somewhat akin to the Teatime Teasers on Countdown, the difference being that the following clues are not funny or pun-based, rather, they are straight and po-faced. First, here are two examples:
NAOHRPORE. Clue: This was the profession of Ned Land in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas. Answer: HARPOONER.
OSODCNEIL. Clue: This word describes what France did to certain African countries and features in such Verne works as Voyages d'Etudes. Answer: COLONISED.
So here are the five conundrums you need to solve in order to win the Verne book collector's item which is the prize for this first competition:
1. T E R V A E D U N
Clue: This word describes a primary theme of practically all of Jules Verne's fictional works.
2. O L I E G X R P N
Clue: This word also describes a theme of virtually all of Verne's works, and is to the forefront in such novels as 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth' and 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas'.
3. Y R O D I C E V S
Clue: This word again describes a theme of most of Verne's fiction.
4. R A S B U I E M N
Clue: This word is the name of the mode of nautical transport captained by Nemo in 'Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas' (a giveaway, this one!)
5. D E L O U T I N G
Clue: A geographical measurement concept which proves important in 'Around the World in Eighty Days'.
As I say, if you are interested in taking part, please send your five answers, together with a postal address, by e-mail to me at kieran.odriscoll3@mail.dcu.ie . The book will be immediately posted to the winner.
The second competition will be published on this blog in about a month's time. The theme of this second challenge will be to solve ten conundrums/anagrams all relating to concepts in Translation Theory. And this time, there won't be any clues, so I will be upping the ante! The prize will be another Verne-related book.
Future competitions will include varied themes such as short quizzes on Verne's life and works, and quizzes on other writers, which could include anybody from Philip Pullman to J.K. Rowling or Lemony Snicket, including questions on the French translations and translators of these popular authors. There will also be occasional competitions seeking a short essay on a set topic in Translation Studies and literary studies. The best essays will be published on this blog. Future prizes will also include - apart from books - copies of the Scrabble and Countdown board games.
So, I hope you will enjoy this, and future, competitions. And I look forward to receiving solutions in the coming days!
Bonne chance et bon courage!
Friday, February 26, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Publication news
It's been quite a while since I last posted an article to this blog. The last few months have been very busy but productive. Thus, in the intervening period since I last wrote a piece for St Jerome's Warblings, there have been a few positive developments on the academic front.
Firstly, I submitted the hard-bound copies of my PhD thesis - Around the World in Eighty Changes: a diachronic study of the multiple causality of six complete translations (1873-2004), from French to English, of Jules Verne's novel Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873) - to the University (Dublin City University), and am due to graduate next month. So it's a great relief to have the PhD process finally completed, and to now be able to look forward to new challenges.
Secondly, i've published two articles on the 1874 translation of the above Verne novel, into English, by the Philadelphia-based translator, Stephen W. White. The articles appear in a 2009 republication by the Choptank Press, US, of White's very accurate, close rendering (which he has entitled The Tour of the World in Eighty Days) of Verne's celebrated novel. One of the articles is entitled Putting White to Rights: re-evaluating the Verne translations of Stephen W. White, and is mainly a descriptive-explanatory analysis of White's translation decisions, and of the various causal influences which together culminated in his producing this unusually (for a Victorian-era rendering of Verne into English) accurate, complete and imitative translation.
The second article in the foregoing republication is co-authored with the editor of this new edition, Dr Norman Wolcott of the US, a Verne savant, and is entitled 'Who was Stephen White?' This article gives a detailed biographical outline of White's professional activities as a jobbing translator of commerical, legal and literary texts, as a stenographer and phonographer, as an employee and later director of a Pennsylvania railroad company, in 1870s Philadelphia, and includes photos and copies of documents from the archives, e.g. a photo of White himself from a high-school almanach, copies of notices in his local newspaper advertising his services as a translator, and so on.
The editor of this publication, Norman Wolcott, continues to perform Trojan work in bringing the unjustly forgotten yet highly competent Victorian translators of Verne, out of the crypt of history and into a 21st century spotlight. Such translators include White himself, together with Frederick Amadeus Malleson, another 19th-century translator of such Verne novels as A Journey into the Interior of the Earth, a rendering first published in 1877.
Wolcott has also penned an Introduction to this republished White rendering. This beautiful edition also contains all of the original illustrations by Neuville and Bennett.
Regretfully, this book is thus far available only through online ordering, on www.lulu.com, but it deserves, I feel, a much wider distribution network, including a presence in bookstores. It deserves to do well for Wolcott.
I'm also currently in the process of translating some early novellas, and end-of-career novels, of Jules Verne, for the North American Jules Verne Society. The first text i've almost finished translating is entitled Jédédias Jamet, or the tale of an inheritance, three chapters written by Verne in his early twenties and subsequently abandoned by him, though it seems that he had intended to make this work into a full-length novel, for which he had composed an outline. The text is satirical, and rather bizarre in parts, and is peppered liberally with legal, mythological, historical and religious references. I have explained these references in footnotes, and intend to post an article in the near future, describing some of these references and discussing the manner in which the translatorial footnotes help to fulfill the so-called 'didactic function of translation' (Brownlie, 2003).
Other than that, i'm busily applying for whatever academic posts seem to be currently advertised, in the areas of Translation Studies and/or French and Spanish Studies. The hopeful, bright spot on the horizon for all of us newly-minted PhDs is that, in many areas such as Translation Studies and French, there seems to be quite a few academic posts out there, in such locations as the United Kingdom, the USA and even a recently-posted advertisement for a French lecturer or Assistant Lecturer in the University of the West Indies (UWI), Bridgetown, Barbados. Plus, a vacancy in Queen's University, Belfast, for a lecturer in Translation Studies with French and Spanish.
The foregoing vacancies can all be viewed on the website www.jobs.ac.uk.
I'm currently editing an article i've had accepted for the online US journal of Verne Studies, Verniana, dealing with abridged and adapted translations of Verne's 80 Days for younger readers, and that should appear in September, 2010; it currently requires to be drastically shortened (ironically, given that the subject matter of the article is the very process of shortening text). The number of examples I tend to give in articles generally, of actual translated stretches of text, is too voluminous. One thing i've learned through the thesis-writing and editing process, especially during the post-viva corrections, is that there is a better, clearer, more concise method of presenting the findings, in synthesized form, of Descriptive-Explanatory Translation Studies (DTS) research; namely, it is preferable to not cite all of the coupled pairs of source and target text segments you've analysed, even in an Appendix.
Instead, the researcher needs to identify, from his/her copious empirical micro-textual examples of shifts and their causes, the most salient recurring features of the shifts in question, and discuss these shift types, and their probable underlying causes, with one or two examples.
Thus, in an abridged version of 80 Days, the researcher might want to discuss salient features such as simplification of language, reduction and omission of complex characterization and of physical description of people and places, with a privileging of plot and action over psychological complexities of characterization, and so on. Giving too many examples in a report on DTS findings, is akin to not being able to see the wood for the trees.
Firstly, I submitted the hard-bound copies of my PhD thesis - Around the World in Eighty Changes: a diachronic study of the multiple causality of six complete translations (1873-2004), from French to English, of Jules Verne's novel Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873) - to the University (Dublin City University), and am due to graduate next month. So it's a great relief to have the PhD process finally completed, and to now be able to look forward to new challenges.
Secondly, i've published two articles on the 1874 translation of the above Verne novel, into English, by the Philadelphia-based translator, Stephen W. White. The articles appear in a 2009 republication by the Choptank Press, US, of White's very accurate, close rendering (which he has entitled The Tour of the World in Eighty Days) of Verne's celebrated novel. One of the articles is entitled Putting White to Rights: re-evaluating the Verne translations of Stephen W. White, and is mainly a descriptive-explanatory analysis of White's translation decisions, and of the various causal influences which together culminated in his producing this unusually (for a Victorian-era rendering of Verne into English) accurate, complete and imitative translation.
The second article in the foregoing republication is co-authored with the editor of this new edition, Dr Norman Wolcott of the US, a Verne savant, and is entitled 'Who was Stephen White?' This article gives a detailed biographical outline of White's professional activities as a jobbing translator of commerical, legal and literary texts, as a stenographer and phonographer, as an employee and later director of a Pennsylvania railroad company, in 1870s Philadelphia, and includes photos and copies of documents from the archives, e.g. a photo of White himself from a high-school almanach, copies of notices in his local newspaper advertising his services as a translator, and so on.
The editor of this publication, Norman Wolcott, continues to perform Trojan work in bringing the unjustly forgotten yet highly competent Victorian translators of Verne, out of the crypt of history and into a 21st century spotlight. Such translators include White himself, together with Frederick Amadeus Malleson, another 19th-century translator of such Verne novels as A Journey into the Interior of the Earth, a rendering first published in 1877.
Wolcott has also penned an Introduction to this republished White rendering. This beautiful edition also contains all of the original illustrations by Neuville and Bennett.
Regretfully, this book is thus far available only through online ordering, on www.lulu.com, but it deserves, I feel, a much wider distribution network, including a presence in bookstores. It deserves to do well for Wolcott.
I'm also currently in the process of translating some early novellas, and end-of-career novels, of Jules Verne, for the North American Jules Verne Society. The first text i've almost finished translating is entitled Jédédias Jamet, or the tale of an inheritance, three chapters written by Verne in his early twenties and subsequently abandoned by him, though it seems that he had intended to make this work into a full-length novel, for which he had composed an outline. The text is satirical, and rather bizarre in parts, and is peppered liberally with legal, mythological, historical and religious references. I have explained these references in footnotes, and intend to post an article in the near future, describing some of these references and discussing the manner in which the translatorial footnotes help to fulfill the so-called 'didactic function of translation' (Brownlie, 2003).
Other than that, i'm busily applying for whatever academic posts seem to be currently advertised, in the areas of Translation Studies and/or French and Spanish Studies. The hopeful, bright spot on the horizon for all of us newly-minted PhDs is that, in many areas such as Translation Studies and French, there seems to be quite a few academic posts out there, in such locations as the United Kingdom, the USA and even a recently-posted advertisement for a French lecturer or Assistant Lecturer in the University of the West Indies (UWI), Bridgetown, Barbados. Plus, a vacancy in Queen's University, Belfast, for a lecturer in Translation Studies with French and Spanish.
The foregoing vacancies can all be viewed on the website www.jobs.ac.uk.
I'm currently editing an article i've had accepted for the online US journal of Verne Studies, Verniana, dealing with abridged and adapted translations of Verne's 80 Days for younger readers, and that should appear in September, 2010; it currently requires to be drastically shortened (ironically, given that the subject matter of the article is the very process of shortening text). The number of examples I tend to give in articles generally, of actual translated stretches of text, is too voluminous. One thing i've learned through the thesis-writing and editing process, especially during the post-viva corrections, is that there is a better, clearer, more concise method of presenting the findings, in synthesized form, of Descriptive-Explanatory Translation Studies (DTS) research; namely, it is preferable to not cite all of the coupled pairs of source and target text segments you've analysed, even in an Appendix.
Instead, the researcher needs to identify, from his/her copious empirical micro-textual examples of shifts and their causes, the most salient recurring features of the shifts in question, and discuss these shift types, and their probable underlying causes, with one or two examples.
Thus, in an abridged version of 80 Days, the researcher might want to discuss salient features such as simplification of language, reduction and omission of complex characterization and of physical description of people and places, with a privileging of plot and action over psychological complexities of characterization, and so on. Giving too many examples in a report on DTS findings, is akin to not being able to see the wood for the trees.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)